What Atheists
Want

February 7,
2008

Over
Christmas, a kind and generous friend, who is also an unbeliever, sent me a copy of a book
called The Might of the West, described on the dust jacket as
A new interpretation of Western history  its development in
medieval times and its decline today.

First published in 1963 by Joseph J. Binns of New York and
Washington, the book is readily available through Amazon.com. Given its high
approval ratings, it appears to be something of a cult classic, though I am
unable to find matches for the author, Lawrence R. Brown, on the Internet.
Brown, an engineer by profession, was a learned man, an excellent stylist,
and an original and provocative thinker, whose striking thesis, contrary to
the established reading of Western history, holds that no real continuity
exists between classical and medieval civilization and that of the West, which
Brown argues began in the 13th century and represents the
living tradition of a people interrelated by blood and culture from the
Carolingian era to that of the French Revolution.

Brown traces the histories of the six preceding civilizations
 Egyptian, Babylonian, Chinese, Indian, Classical, and Levantine
 with particular attention to the modes of thought typified by each.
The flap copy states the argument clearly. Mr. Brown
is especially concerned with the Levant, and in a brilliant reconstruction of
the life of Jesus, shows him to be the product of a civilization fundamentally
different from our own, and not as rationalized into Western thought.

I am not here concerned with Browns interesting and
partly persuasive views regarding the continuity of the civilization we call
Western, nor with the implications of his contention that the Jewish
civilization from which Christ arose has little in common with the Christian
civilization of the West that came later. (Who would think, really, of denying
the obvious?) Nor, finally, am I interested in Mr. Brown
himself, an obscure author whose single work has been entirely without
influence among historians, archaeologists, and the general public. Rather,
my subject is Browns mode of historical exposition and the
counter-theological assumptions and expectations that underlie it, all of
which appear to be shared by the more notorious atheists of the present
day, including, especially, Christopher Hitchens, author of the recently
published god Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything.

The primary thesis of The Might of the West, it is
true, is not that there is no God and that Jesus Christ is not his son. But
Brown does deny that ideas such as cause or God 
which for him are merely mechanical and emotional words for the same thing
 are illusions that exist within the mind, not beyond it.

Moreover, he expends much intellectual effort in applying the
historicist argument to the Old and New Testaments to prove (a) that the
first was edited by Jewish priests to construct a historical pedigree for the
Jews who predated the time of Ezra and Nehemiah, about 400
B.C., when Brown claims the historic Jews actually became a people;
and (b) that the second is a composite work whose individual Gospels were
written by different men with varying doctrinal agendas. Christianity, he
concludes, was actually founded not by Christians but by
Hellenic Jews, and developed by them.

Much
of this was old hat almost 50 years ago, while the historicist
method of Biblical criticism was a going
operation in the 19th century. Moreover, Browns
measuredly skeptical argument is a far cry from Hitchenss
adolescent rantings and insults. Yet both books, like the atheist traditions
they represent, do raise a question, namely: What do atheists really want
from the God controversy? Their answer would be, Nothing but the empirical
truth, since God does not exist. The true answer, however, would seem to be
 Everything! What they want is for God to prove his
existence for them directly and unambiguously, rather than speaking to them
from behind a veil.

Atheists actually demand more, not less, of God
than do believers, the faithful. Indeed, their fundamental (and
fundamentalist) approach to revealed religion demonstrates as much. The
atheist quarrel with Divine Revelation at bottom is not that Revelation is
nonsense and a fraud. It is that Revelation, such as we have it, is not direct
enough.

Like all men impatient of veils and indirection, atheists (of the
garden variety, at least) have no use for poetry, which they are quite
incapable of recognizing, let alone understanding. Lawrence Brown has made
a thorough study of the Bible. Alas, he has given it a literal reading where he
ought to have given it a poetic one. Revelation is nothing if not divine poetry,
but Brown, like the vast majority of his kind, will have none of it. For him, the
Bible is inaccurate and dishonest history that cannot be verified by modern
historical research. How can it be said to have been divinely inspired 
he intimates  when all of its books can be shown to
have been edited and re-edited by priests and others seeking to fabricate a
religion? The notion that the editing, as well as the writing, of the books of
the Bible, might have been inspired by the Holy Ghost never occurs to him.
(Perhaps the notion was too historicist for Lawrence Brown!)

Of course, the problem with reading the Bible as faked history is
that the most important passages of the Testaments, Old and New, are not
historical at all but profoundly poetic, moral, and theological. To read the
historical accounts in this context allows the reader to understand that the
story of the Bible is not the literal narrative of Gods historical
engagement with mankind, but the one he wanted us to have, for reasons
known only to himself.

One has to feel sorry for atheists. They can believe in the Word of
God only if the Book that embodies it can be shown to embody as well the
scientific proof of its Truth. But the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, and
of Jesus Christ has, in one respect at least, been very explicit and direct in
telling us that we are saved by faith alone, and that faith is the belief in
things unseen.

Atheism is not independence, and it is certainly not freedom.
Rather, it is human neediness and dependency in their most extreme form, a
cry for divine aid that, in the case of such as Lawrence Brown, expresses
itself in pseudo scholarship and, in that of Christopher Hitchens, assumes
the form of a curse. Because the atheist, too, is a human being, craving
Gods certainty and his love. He only pretends to us  and to
him  that he is not.

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